10 Sales Tactics for Startups from a $20 Million VP of Sales

Published by on January 7, 2010

Matt Bell did a guest post on TechCrunch highlighting how he helped his startup go from $0 to $20 million in sales, and these tips are surprisingly easy, yet unexpected.

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If you’ve ever made a cold call or ever worked in a startup with $0 sales, you understand how important sales is to any business. Without it, nobody gets paid, and the company shuts down.

And in a startup company, making a sale is 1000 times more difficult than it is at IBM. Nobody knows who you are, nobody cares, and nobody trusts you.

So how, as a startup company, do you overcome these huge odds and make a sale?

Here are 10 tips from a guy who knows.

10 Sales Strategies for Startups

1. Be mutantly flexible: The biggest advantage you have when competing with giants is just giving customers exactly what they want. Promise the moon then break down your CEO’s door to make sure your customer gets it. Engineers can complain all they want after the fact, but most actually prefer rallying for a paying customer. Large competitors have to stick to rigid guidelines, satisfy dozens of constituencies in the install-base and within their own organization, and optimize for the masses. A startup’s essential promise isn’t to be like Hertz, which gets everything exactly right, but to be like Avis: we try harder.

2. Juice the comp plan: if you want capable, blood-thirsty reps, build a comp plan short on guarantees and big on incentives. High base salaries are for IBM’s order-takers, not true hunters. You know you’ve got it right when the rest of the management team is worried about a success-disaster: if we make our numbers, won’t all the sales reps all get rich? That’s a good problem to have. Verdiem’s Jim Flatley taught me this at Plumtree: he fought to get early reps 15% of every sale, but after we made our numbers for the first time ever, nobody wanted to pay them less. Even after the bubble burst and every other technology company took a blood-bath, Jim kept delivering results.

For the full list, head over to the original TechCrunch article.